Twenty-three years ago, a second-year high school head coach packed his Toyota 4Runner and set off on a 700-mile football excursion from North Jersey to northern Kentucky. He saved what little cash he had, sleeping in his truck for three nights and consuming a McDonald’s-only diet. He spent most of his waking hours at a clinic hosted by the University of Kentucky, soaking up all he could from coaches who would go on to revolutionize the game and showering in those same guys’ facilities whenever he saw an opening.
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“I just wanted to go down there,” Phil Longo said. “I was searching for an offense to run.”
The fuse for the pyrotechnics in Chapel Hill this fall was lit back in Lexington, when Longo took what he learned from Hal Mumme and Mike Leach back to Parsippany Hills High, using the spirit of the then-novel air raid to become the winningest coach in school history. His career has been nomadic even by his profession’s standards since, a nine-stop tour through gridiron outposts from Duluth to Carbondale, from Slippery Rock to Huntsville (the one in Texas, which is five times smaller than the one in Alabama).
Now at North Carolina, Longo has the Hall of Fame boss, the blue-chip quarterback and the national brand that a kid who was born and raised on the Jersey Shore could only dream of. His No. 25 Tar Heels have become appointment viewing every weekend for their ability to defy convention on the ground and through the air, to turn daunting deficits into casual victories. No. 2 Notre Dame will provide the stiffest challenge yet on Black Friday, and though the Heels acknowledge the magnitude of the moment awaiting them, the enthusiasm is never to be confused with emotion, lest anyone mistake them for not planning this all out.
“Most people don’t agree with me, but football is about focus and it’s about minimizing mistakes and playing fast, and I think if you have emotional highs then you’re gonna have emotional lows, and you don’t want emotional lows,” Longo said. “It’s humanly impossible to stay on an emotional high every play for 3 1/2 hours for four straight quarters. A human being can’t do that, so that means he has to come down off that at some point.
“So I would rather have them really, really focused, play really, really fast, because you’re not handicapping them mentally, and playing with a tremendous amount of enthusiasm.”
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The Heels rank fourth nationally in total offense (563.4) and yards per play (7.7). They are the only team with a top-14 passing (329.9) and top-14 rushing offense (233.5). Their quarterback, Sam Howell, is coming off a 571-total-yard, seven-touchdown performance in which he led UNC to 28 fourth-quarter points to beat Wake Forest 59-53. Their running back duo, junior Javonte Williams and senior Michael Carter, is the only pair of teammates in the nation who average more than 100 rush yards apiece.
“He found a way to get us the ball, to let us run the ball,” Williams said of Longo. “He also found ways to get us going in the passing game.”
Consider it the personal touch to what Longo had taken away from his trip to the Bluegrass State two decades earlier. He always felt there needed to be a component to offensive football that was physical in nature. One of his first pupils, R.J. Cobbs, reaped the benefits of that philosophy, rushing for more than 3,500 yards and amassing another 1,100 receiving yards in his prep career before becoming a standout player at UMass.
The dual-threat nature of Williams and Carter is enough to spook opposing defensive coordinators, and that’s before they even find themselves in the middle of the madness on game days. The two have combined for the most yards from scrimmage (268.9) by a running back duo since USC’s 2005 tandem of Reggie Bush and LenDale White (287.6). Williams and Carter are the nation’s only players with at least 800 rushing yards and 200 receiving yards.
Williams leads the nation with 18 total touchdowns, and Longo says he has become the guy he leans on the most when calling plays.
Asking the backs how they complement each other is a fool’s errand, considering they see so much of themselves in the other. Carter held up a pair of crossed fingers to describe how close he is with Williams, saying he’s never had someone he could rely on like this before.
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“Just having somebody like Mike that I can compete with and just seeing him make plays, it also helps my confidence,” Williams said.
At the center of it all is Howell, a sophomore whom Mack Brown flipped from Florida State before handing over the keys to the rookie on day one of the College Football Hall of Famer’s second stint at UNC last season. The ballyhooed passer became a Freshman All-American and helped engineer the Heels’ revival under the now-69-year-old Brown. He has followed that up by leading the ACC in passing yards (2,631) and touchdowns (23) by a healthy margin this season.
The quarterback and his coordinator are kindred spirits, the former praising the latter by saying Longo’s body language is the same whether he’s up 40 or down 40, whether he’s feeling heat on the field or, in a rather extreme analogy, off the field.
“If Sam and I were in a movie theater watching a movie and it was on fire, we’d probably watch 10-15 more minutes of the movie before one of us said, ‘You know what, we might want to get up and leave,’” Longo said. “That’s kind of our approach to it. It’s chill and it’s casual and it’s poised.”
Normally, when a talented quarterback is between his sophomore and junior season, Longo will break down some NFL film with him in an effort to over-prepare for all that is coming his way. With the pandemic upending everyone’s offseason plans, Longo decided to move Howell ahead of schedule.
They hopped on a nightly Zoom call this offseason, devoting each session to a single NFL defense, one by one until they covered all 32 teams. Once coverages were broken down and studied, they started calling UNC’s offense against those pro defenders on film.
“Every single thing they do in the NFL is disguise,” Howell said, “and they do a really good job of that.”
Winning time knows no limits, so Howell has staked a claim to the final frame on Tobacco Road. He has completed 66.2 percent of his passes for 1,430 yards with 17 touchdowns and no picks in the fourth quarter during his career. UNC has outscored opponents by 133 points in the fourth quarter since Brown took over, the best in the nation by a whopping 49 points.
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Longo calls the plays from the field to streamline communication, and to pick up on cues such as when his linemen can tell that their opponents are gassed and it’s time to up the tempo. His motto, “Don’t Blink,” may be as cliche as they come, but when Brown is running up and down the sideline in the first quarter after quick-strike touchdowns (“imposters,” as he calls them) telling everyone the score is 0-0, it is easy to lock back in.
This unit leads the nation in plays of 10 or more yards, is third in plays of 20 or more yards and is fifth in plays of 30 or more yards. That quick-strike attack allows for comebacks like their last outing against Wake, when they scored 35 consecutive points in the second half, or their romp of NC State, when they ran away from their rivals with a 31-point second half.
At the controls of it all is a 52-year-old play caller who found what he was looking for on an 11-hour drive in a vehicle that has long since been upgraded.
“That’s probably a big advantage for me: I haven’t had to change from one offense to the other,” Longo said. “So we just take the Ferrari every year and try to figure out a way to make it a little bit faster for next year.”
(Photo of Sam Howell and Michael Carter: Grant Halverson / Getty Images)